Jean Campbell’s Funeral Sermon

It all starts with God’s love - literally, everything started with God’s love. Looking back on creation, why would God create anything to begin with? Like a married love, like a parent God wanted to expand and share his love. Even before creation, God existed as three, this mutually self-sacrificial community of love: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Looking at you, the particular combination of genes, experiences, timings, and more all meant that God aligned the universe in such a way that you became you. Why? Because he loves you. It all started with God’s love. 

So, it started with God’s love, but where is it going? Well, in some ways that is up to us, but in most ways it is up to God. We can look at the brokenness and evil of the world and decide that this sin is running the show. That is a real temptation because if we choose that is winning we are more likely to see it, follow it, act on it, and then live in it. But I call this a temptation because it isn’t real, it isn’t true. Sure there is evil being done, there are people being killed, even someone dying naturally is a marker that evil still has a hold. But don’t be fooled, evil has never and will never be winning. People are still fighting, loving, holding on, responding with faith and love. Love still holds sway. At all times, even when we humans aren’t enough, God’s love is still guiding and upholding everything in love. 

You might not see it. Maybe death, grief, suffering, or a hard past is blocking your vision, but push those fickle things from your view and look to God. See that his love is still acting in your life and the lives of those around you. Trust him and follow that love into action. You will probably be surprised at the amazing ways God shows up in love. I have been too many times to count. I can tell you how God acted in the everyday mundane and in the extravagant miraculous change your life ways. I have seen and experienced it. The same love that overcame suffering and death on the cross, is the same love of God in Jesus that is still working in our lives trying to lead us to a deeper experience and knowledge of that love. 

So finally, where does this love end? It ends in itself. It ends in the time to come when we either decide to accept God’s love completely as we accept the fullness of a relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit or we decide to reject it. This is the same decision we are faced with every day in this life. Are we accepting or rejecting that love? Are we letting anything stand in the way of it? It’s very easy to put something else in front of God and his love. Yet, Jesus comes to help us. He forgives us, he offers his hand, and he lifts us up. He has already gone ahead of us to make a place for us where we might live with him and in his love. So he will come to bring us to himself. It is and always has, been our choice whether we trust that hand enough to take it and follow his love in this life and the next. AMEN